Great Modern Chinese novels or The last century in China through Chinese Literature (Part 2)

This is the second part of my blog about some of my favourite Chinese novels from the last century, focusing on what the novels reveal about how the writers view political and social developments during this period.

The books in part 2 focus on the era of reform and opening up, after Mao’s death, during which the Communist Party has continued to maintain an iron political grip on the country, while introducing market reforms. The result is that China increasingly feels like any another capitalist economy, but one in which corruption is rife and political freedoms very limited.

In this novel, greedy, corrupt local officials having ordered the peasants to grow only garlic, then refuse to take all the harvest, telling the peasants they can eat their crops themselves. When the farmers riot, their leaders are thrown into prison.

One unsuccessful rioter advises fellow inmates: ‘Try to see things as they are. The world isn’t made for people like us. We must accept our fate’.

As China’s economy takes off in the 1990s and some Chinese people start to look for get rich quick schemes, a puffed up local official decides the solution to the area’s problems, and his own ambitions, is to buy Lenin’s embalmed corpse from the Russians.

Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years is a dystopian science fiction novel set in a future (but very familiar) China, in which nearly all citizens are extraordinarily happy.

A small group of people, unaffected by this happiness, believe that a month has somehow been wiped from people’s memories and they set out to find out what happened.

Gradually the central character, Old Chen, comes to realise just how little information is available about key parts of Communist China’s recent history.

Half way through the book, Old Chen wonders whether their quest to find out what had happened in the missing 28 days is worthwhile: ‘Should we force the younger generation to remember the suffering of their parents’ generation? Do our intellectuals have a duty to walk through a minefield in order to oppose the machine of state?’

After all, he thinks, ‘90 per cent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 per cent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough?’

Chan clearly does believe that as a writer he ‘has a duty to walk through the minefield’. The book is an expression of the authors’s anger and frustration at the the collective loss of memory over events such as Tianenmen.

The period since Mao has brought a great deal of prosperity to China. Millions of people living in Beijing, and many of China’s other cities, have standards of living that are increasingly not so very different from those of people in the west.

However, Xu’s protagonists are migrants from the countryside, doing whatever they can to get by in the city.

At the start of the novel, the picaresque hero, Dunhuang has just emerged from a prison sentence for hustling fake IDs. He is soon back on his feet, this time selling pirated DVDs.

Dunhuang moves at a helper skelter pace through the city, encountering a range of different characters.

At times the book could be mistaken for a documentary account of the lives of migrants struggling for survival on the fringes of Beijing’s booming economy. However, it is a very engaging story that is told with a sense of energy, humour and humanity.

The Seventh Day is both a very enjoyable read and a critique on some of the injustices and social problems in today’s China.

At the start of the book, the main character, Yang Fei, finds that he has died but decides not to turn up to his own funeral and so ends up in the ‘land of the unburied’.

He meets people killed in a department store fire in which the scale of the casualties was covered up, so as not to affect the careers of local officials.

There is a couple who died when the city government are determined to demolish their apartment building, despite the residents refusing to move out. One man has been tortured by police into ‘confessing’ that he had killed his wife.

There are foetuses which had been aborted ‘to comply with population-control guidelines’, and then dumped in the river together with dead infants, whose parents had fled to avoid paying medical expenses. When journalists attempt to cover the story they are censored, so they post the details and photos on the internet.

The dead enjoy ‘fresh’, ‘delicious’, and ‘healthy’ food, in contrast to ‘those defective food items so pervasive in the departed world’ such as ‘tainted milk formula’ and ‘fecal tofu’. One of the dead observes: ‘We’re enjoying the same treatment as those top leaders’.

Consumerism as well as Chinese communism is also satirised in the story. A beautiful girl has leapt from a high building simply because her boyfriend bought her a fake iPhone.

That concludes my choice of ten great Chinese novels (including one short story) from the last hundred years. There are many books I have not yet read, and no doubt ones I have, that others will believe should have been on this list.

The next books on my reading list include Mo Yan’s Frogs and Murong Xuecun’s Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu. I’d love to hear about Chinese novels (available in English) that other people would recommend.